Steven High, Concordia University
Proposal Type
Panel
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
Related Topics
- Labor and Economy
- Place
- Public Engagement
Abstract
Much of the scholarship has focused on industrial heritage sites with little regard for their relationships with area residents. Heritage may have a vital role to play in recognizing the industrial past and in countering enforced forgetting, but is the politics of recognition enough? Can industrial heritage harm those whose pasts are being represented? To what extent are the economic benefits of industrial heritage preservation redistributed? How do we recognize the industrial past, without ignoring Jim Crow racism, or settler colonialism? And, how can industrial heritage trouble the conflation of working-class with whiteness? Is there a tension between industrial heritage and changing demographics in an area?
Description
This session proposal is concerned with the class and racial politics of industrial heritage in deindustrializing/ gentrifying areas. Fundamentally, deindustrialization is a process of physical and social ruination, often with devastating environmental implications, as well as part of a wider political project that leaves working-class and racialized communities impoverished and demoralized. Forced forgetting is an integral part of the deindustrialization process. The class cleansing underway in some cities begins with mill and factory closings and ends with their post-industrial occupation and gentrification: this two-step process represents a double erasure.
Much of the scholarship has focused on industrial heritage sites with little regard for their evolving relationships with surrounding residents. What is that relationship and how has it changed over time? Heritage may have a vital role to play in recognizing the industrial past and in countering enforced forgetting, but is the politics of recognition enough? Can industrial heritage sites actually harm those whose pasts are being represented? To what extent are the economic benefits of industrial heritage preservation redistributed? And, ultimately, who do these sites serve?
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Steven High, [email protected].
All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 1, 2018. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
Great panel proposal. We have a team in Michigan Tech’s Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program building an interactive online historical atlas for the Copper Country called the Keweenaw Time Traveler (www.keweenawhistory.com). This region has been facing deindustrialization processes for 75 years, and issues of class and definitions of whiteness play in to historical memory pretty heavily. Our community-engaged project provides a platform for anyone to add place-based stories on historically accurate maps, and also to search and browse mapped demographic data. We are learning about how this community wants to use the Time Traveler for heritage and community memory today. I’d love to talk with you about whether this project would be a good contribution to your panel. Thanks!
Hi Sarah,
This sounds fabulous! Sorry for the slow response – I’ve been travelling for the past week. But your project would be perfect for the session. Could you send me a paper proposal abstract to my personal email ([email protected]) – and any suggestions as to the framing text. I have another paper submitted as well as my own – so we are now 3. I guess we need one more. I have someone else in mind – who I can approach.
Really glad to see this idea surfacing as a possible session, Steve. My one suggestion would be that it would be great to link this in some way with a New England site, perhaps Hartford itself, which would give this panel a nice resonance with both the venue and the conference theme. We’re hoping to have a thread throughout the program relating to the weapons industry in Hartford and the CT River Valley, and my guess is that most of it will be focusing on questions about the legacies of gun violence, but your proposal comes at it from another important angle, in asking how we should negotiate the tensions among different ways of experiencing and remembering industries, in all their complexity.
Thanks Cathy – this would be great.
Befitting topic for the Hartford Conference! Best…
I’m very interested in your panel proposal and perhaps participating. I’ve have been working on the initiation and development of a national park in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, for quite a while now. The park’s focus on the complex social history represented by the Richmond Kaiser shipyards could be a great case study for the panel you’re considering.
Steve,
Your panel proposal is right on target.
In my research on the East Tennessee marble industry (which thrived here from about 1850-1940) a number of solid pieces of evidence of African American labor have surfaced. While a number of white descendants of marble industry workers and others connected in various ways have come forward proudly to claim connection to a once major industry, there has been little response from the African American community, despite a good deal of publicity, several community history gatherings, and a museum exhibition that highlighted African American connections to the marble industry. We are seeking ways to continue to enlarge the narrative by reaching families either dispersed geographically or alienated from the industry during the long period of Jim Crow. I will be most interested to attend your session and possibly to participate if you feel this line of inquiry seems useful.